The present invention relates to a universal mount for mounting a equipment to a surface in a desired orientation, and in particular, relates to a universal mount for mounting equipment to the windshield or side panel of an aircraft or other vehicle where it may be desired to support the piece of equipment substantially laterally with respect to the support.
Existing universal mounts for mounting equipment to a side or front surface of a vehicle, like an aircraft, a car, a boat, etc. are used to mount relatively lightweight accessories such as sun visors, etc. This is due to two reasons. First, universal mounts typically employ ball joints to facilitate a wide range of adjustment of the orientation of the sun visor or other lightweight accessory. The mounts, and in particular the ball joints, are often limited in terms of the torque, or moment, that they are able to adjustably support while maintaining the ability to manually tighten the ball joint to a secured orientation or manually loosen the ball joint from a secured orientation. Stated differently, if a universal mount were to laterally support a heavy object, the requisite force necessary to securely tighten the joint of the universal mount may be too great to either manually apply when tightening the joint or manually overcome when loosening the joint. A second, related reason, is that even when sufficient manual force may be applied to operate a joint that laterally supports a heavy accessory, the universal nature of the joint results in the heavy object tending to tilt downwards when loosened even when it is only desired to adjust the lateral angular orientation of the accessory, such that upon loosening the universal joint, one hand must be devoted to supporting the heavy object until the joint is tightened again with the other hand. This makes adjustment of heavy accessories supported by universal joints awkward.
An additional problem associated with universal mounts for vehicle accessories is that such accessories typically include an attachment plate securable to a planar surface, a universal joint, and an adapter matingly engageable with a particular type accessory. For example, because sun visors are typically thin and elongate with a cylindrical upper tube for a base, the adapter for a universal sun visor mount will typically comprise an elongate prong insertable into the tube of the sun visor. The universal sun visor mount, however, may not be used to support other types of accessories such as an altimeter, wind gauge, etc.
What is desired, therefore, is an improved universal equipment mount.